I'm sketching at Panera Bread today, which seems the modern day equivalent of the cafeterias of the 1930's, where the entrees were sold through slotted vending windows and everything cost a nickel. This is Hemingway's "clean, well-lighted place."
This one is in an outdoor mall, adjacent to a senior center, so the place is wall-to-wall seniors lining up for their lukewarm ladel of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup in a hallowed out round of sourdough bread. My God! Such expectant, joyous faces.
I'm listening to The Throwing Muses song "Limbo" on my ipod while I let my hand sketch over the page. It's an unconscious act, completely devoid of thought. I scan the room as the music picks up the soundtrack. All those happy, pale, wrinkled faces slurping their soup and gnashing their crusty baguettes while Kristin Hersh repeats the haunting lyrics, "nice Limbo you have here, nice Limbo you have here..." It's quite eerie, mesmerizing even. In the a-capella bridge she repeats the line to a thumping beat, "dead is next door, dead is next door." I look up at the overly rouged faces, the sagging arms, the bruised, crackly flesh and think "yes, dead is next door."
I picked up a used copy of an older Bukowski poetry compilation that I did not have, but I recognized the first poem as one that rips my heart out every time I read it. The poem is called "The Tragedy of the Leaves" and I pick it up to read it in the lull between changing the music and starting a new, fresh page. I'm fixated on the old people. So many old people here today, and they are nothing like the aging Bukowski who continued to booze it up, to womanize, to bet the ponies at Santa Anita, to write amazing poems until he died at the age of 74. He would have shot cannonballs into the center of the restaurant and laughed at the mound of rotting, charred corpses and screwed every underage waitress as the wreckage smoldered. He wouldn't have been content, never have been ecstatic for a mediocre bowl of tepid cream soup. I keep reading and re-reading the same section over and over again...
"I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young
and said to have genius; but
that's the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world had failed us
both "
Rips and shreds my soul apart every time I read it and
then Hope Sandoval comes on the ipod next and sends me
sinking into deeper, darker waters of despair.
